Andrew Conroy

Rigging a mustache

So you’ve got a sweet character in mind for your next shot but, he’s missing something. A killer stache.

There are many ways to rig a stache to your character. I’ll cover two quickly but there is a third way for much more complex situations. We’ll have to save that for another time.

The Easy Way: Select the stache and this man’s face, and glue it on there using the wrap deformer. You can find that under Deformers > Wrap.

The Not-So Easy Way:
Let’s say you want to animate this snot mop. If you’re game on, it’s really only gonna take 15 minutes, total. But you’ll need to do a little rigging work. From here, I’ll show you a simple and easy way to get your stache working smoothly with your character face.

Tip 1: Rig the Stache. For almost every mustache situation you might find yourself in, a simple FK rig will work. You’ll only need to remember one thing, each side of your stache needs to be rigged with a group above the controllers. We’re gonna need to use that group to snap our stache in place.

Tip 2: Use the super helpful DJ Rivet script found Here. You’ll need to install that puppy and then reopen maya. To run the script, you’ll just need to select the Child then the Parent, then execute this code snippet in your mel line:source djRivet.mel; djRivet;

Tip 3: When it’s all said and done, do yourself a favor and put all your new controls, joints and geo in a group called Stache_World. (or something like that) This will keep everything clean as you start working in you scene